Lost

Lost has never been done before. And it will never be done again.

Lost has never been done before. And it will never be done again. Oh, they’ve tried: The “next Losts” — Flash Forward, V, The Nine, DayBreak — all ended in commercial and critical failure.

But the tale of plane crash survivors stranded on a freaky-deaky island somehow worked. TiVo and Hulu and Netf ix made it possible for fans to follow it, while blogs and Internet forums made it possible for them to obsess about it.

Yet, at the very beginning, while the rest of the world went crazy over smoke monsters and polar bears, I was a Lost skeptic.

When the two main protagonists — whiny Dr. Jack and wishy-washy Kate — weren’t boring, they were annoying. The constant flashbacks were poison to pacing, ripping us out of the fascinating world of miraculous healing and sci-fi hatches to finally answer the question of… how Jack got that tattoo on his arm. (Spoiler: In the dullest way possible.)

It was only the last minute of each episode, where a shocking cliffhanger would come out of nowhere, followed — boom — by the Lost logo, that kept me clicking “next episode.”

But where bad show-runners, like those at Heroes and 24, take their hit status as signs that they have no need to change, good show-runners, like Joss Whedon and the Lost guys, find their flaws. And fix them.

Lost started giving us less Jack and Kate, and more Ben Linus (a Machiavellian sociopath), Daniel Fareday (a twitchy quantum physicist) and Desmond Hume (a Scotsman unstuck in time, Vonnegut-style.) Angsty love-triangle plotlines were out, hard sci-fi brilliance was in.

And the flashbacks? In the Season Three finale, those became flashforwards, and then the island itself — not just the narrative — began jumping around in time.

Suddenly, it became clear: Lost’s themes were embedded in the meta-structure of the show itself. Those obnoxious flashbacks both foreshadowed future time-traveling episodes and underscored Lost’s theme of the grip of the past on the future.

And as Lost became more deeply, unabashedly sci-fi , its characters, counterintuitively, became even better drawn.

Season Four gave us a time-bending, mind-bending episode so brain-blowing that it gave the characters aneurysms. But that same time-travel episode also happened to feature, perhaps, the most romantic love story ever seen on television.

24 It’s Jack
Bauer’s eighth all-nighter — but the kind where toenails are pulled
instead of painted. As Bauer rasps and waterboards his way toward
finding Mr. Terrorist Mastermind, we at home, playing the 24 cliché
drinking game (“Dammit,” “Perimeter,” “Within the hour?” Drink!), come
dangerously close to alcohol poisoning. (Fox, Mondays, 9 pm)

The Deep End If
Defying Gravity was Grey’s Anatomy But They’re in Space, then The Deep
End is Grey’s Anatomy But They’re in Suits. These fresh faces out of
law school have to work 80 hours a week, but will that stop them from
hookups? Probably not. Expect terms like “briefs” to be used, with
multiple connotations. (ABC, Thursdays, 8 pm)

Spartacus: Blood and Sand As
HBO, Showtime and (now) Starz have shown us, if there’s one common
thread throughout history, it’s explicit unprotected sex. This latest
entry in soft-core history stylishly tells the story of a Roman slave
uprising — but it does have a few obvious plot holes. For example: Not
all the slaves can be named Spartacus. That’s just absurd. And
inefficient. (Starz, Fridays, 10 pm)